Tuesday, October 05, 2010

Publication limbo

A little puzzle for my reader to ponder over...

Why do you think it might it be that our Climatic Change paper, accepted for publication in August 2009, and published online in October of that year, has not yet appeared in print? It's the oldest paper on the list of "online first" manuscripts (equal in date with one other) and I have noticed that many other manuscripts have jumped in front of it. Eg I just checked the first 5 papers in the latest issue and all of them were published online after ours, all but one were accepted after (albeit not always by much). I suppose it doesn't matter that much, as in principle the paper is accessible and citable in current form, but it does seem a little odd and certainly won't have helped its dissemination.

Can anyone guess the reason for the apparent delay? (I have a pretty good idea myself, but have asked the journal directly...)

James, I've been discussing your use of rank histogram to show that models are reliable at the Air Vent. Here's a question: you've shown that based on the rank histogram, the various models are statistically indistinguishable. You've also shown that climate sensitivity is most likely 3C per doubling but it is not uniformly distributed over the range 1.5C - 4.5C. Are the two conclusions consistent with each other? In other words, why would you not expect to see uniform distribution for sensitivity over the 1.5C-4.5C range.

To be honest, I don't really think the models are truly statistically indistinguishable from the truth, I'm really just trying to promote it as the appropriate standard that the ensemble should be tested against (in contrast to than the bizarre and useless truth-centred idea). [I'm surprised and encouraged as to how well the tests have worked out so far, but that doesn't actually make it *true*.]

However, the distribution of sensitivites of the CMIP3 (IPCC AR4) models does actually form a pretty plausible distribution IMO, albeit a bit bumpy. The values (of 19 models available at that time) are listed in a table in Chapter 8. There is no reason to expect them to be spread uniformly.